


About Ten Seconds

by CollisionTheory



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Clone Trooper Inhibitor Chips (Star Wars), F/M, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Pre-Order 66 (Star Wars), foxiyoweek2020, like we're almost entirely in his head, this is G but I rated it T due to sexual metaphors and references, this is mostly about Fox FYI
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,746
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28472535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CollisionTheory/pseuds/CollisionTheory
Summary: Commander Fox is summoned to Chancellor Palpatine's office during the manhunt for ARC trooper Fives. When it's all over, he subconsciously feels that something isn't quite right...
Relationships: Riyo Chuchi/CC-1010 | Fox
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11





	About Ten Seconds

**Author's Note:**

> “The difference between a good officer and a poor one is about ten seconds.” – Commodore Arleigh Burke, 1943. 
> 
> \---
> 
> For Foxiyo Week 2020:  
> Wednesday, December 30th - Agony: torture, trauma, heartbreak

“Commander Fox!” Chancellor Palpatine clapped his aged hands together in front of his robes as the guardsman stepped into his office. His smile was kind, but Fox could sense an undercurrent of worry- and no wonder, given what the old man had just been through.

The search for the Chancellor’s would-be assassin, the ARC trooper Fives, was still underway. As soon as the Corrie Guard had been notified, all its parts and pieces had slipped into action like a well-oiled commando droid. The surveillance probes- all of them- had spilled out of their nests exactly on time, deploying to complement the pattern of squads fanning out over the city. This pleased Fox- aside from indicating that he had done his job, it might finally get _certain people_ to appreciate that pursuing 100% unit readiness was not simply an excuse for leadership to get in its quota of being on your ass about whatever it karking felt like that day. 

“You pinged my com, sir?” said Fox, standing straight-backed in front of the Chancellor’s desk. He’d almost been back to the elevator with the rest of his men, ready to oversee the manhunt, when his commlink had gone off again.

“Yes, yes…but sit down my lad, sit down!” Palpatine pushed himself out of his chair with some effort, slowly making his way around the desk to stand nearer to the taller man, shuffling robes soft over the carpet.  
  
He folded his hands again, opening his mouth and looking at the ground for a moment. It was though he wanted to say something but couldn’t manage it, instead gently motioning for Fox to take a seat at his desk.

“This will be…. _easier_ , if you just sit down, Fox. And do take off your helmet, please. I’d like to see a familiar face.” Palpatine leaned on the desk and sighed, pursing his lips together in a troubled smile.

His hand was resting near a bowl of citrus biscuits. He would always offer one to the Commander during their routine briefings, and Fox would always refuse out of polite professionalism. 

‘Please?’ That was a new one. Fox sank slowly into a chair, feeling of trepidation growing. This… this wasn’t what he had expected. For reasons he didn’t understand, despite the fact his superior had specifically requested his presence, he had a weirdly growing sense that he shouldn’t be here.

Fox popped the seal on his helmet and held it in the crook of his arm. It didn’t feel right to take it off in front of the Chancellor, but he’d been requested to do so.

Sheev sighed and slowly made his way around to the back of Fox’s chair.

Fox’s eyes caught a reflection of something behind him in the polished window and tensed immediately. It bashed the switch of his fight-or-flight response, but as the ‘flight’ part was permanently disabled, the indicator needle instead pointed firmly to _‘ **kriffing osik**.’_

A black mouth and pallid face drooped down in sickly folds. The eyes were jaundiced, but bright like the fiery innards of the Central Detention Center crematorium. Something awful congealed inside Fox’s core, but that was quickly overshadowed by a deep, throbbing ache at the back of his skull before he dropped into a blank state of mind.

Fox would remember being in the Chancellor’s office today, but his memory would be quite different from what actually happened.

Darth Sidious grinned with poisonous glee, spreading bloated white fingers with torn, yellowed nails over the back of the CC unit’s chair.

He wheezed and laughed, then let his voice slither out to give his instructions.

“ _Commander Fox- find CT-5555 and kill him. Use only lethal force; the clone must not survive._ ”

“It will be done, Lord Sidious,” replied CC-1010.

Wordlessly, CC-1010 got up and turned to carry out his orders. He unholstered his DC-17s, ensuring that stun-mode was deselected, then hailed two squads of CT units via secure comm channel to stand ready and secure perimeter around the Chancellor’s office. Another squad of men would wait inside with him to review the surveillance data as it beamed onto their datascreens. Once they had a location on the ARC trooper, two LAATs outside with engines running hot were ready to snap them over on site of the target.

It hadn’t taken more than two hours. Chancellor Palpatine was looking considerably more at ease, though still worried, as he sat surrounded by his closest advisors and Fox’s Guard. Then a surveillance droid had picked up something, and the commander visually confirmed it via his HUD feed.

“Sir, the fugitive clone has been spotted by one of our probes in sector I-9.”

\---

Commander Fox’s only regret was that the trooper had drawn on his men at all, that the ARC hadn’t stood down when ordered to.

Others might have said, with gentle voices and sad, soft eyes, that he’d made _a hard choice._ There was nothing hard about it; he had followed the regulations and procedures of his job as duty required- to the letter. Indecision regarding any sub-point within those could likely have seen his men (or him) dead, not to mention constituting a failure of leadership on his part. He was absolutely confident, and he had absolutely no patience for those who would say he should have let his mind lag for even a second to _ponder_ over changing blaster fire settings when a second was the difference between life and death. Whether on Geonosis for the first battle against the CIS or urban warfare in the undercity of Coruscant- that law of combat did not change, and you forgot it at the peril of your _entire team._

His shock troopers had provided eye-witness testimony to the assassination attempt in the Grand Medical Facility. The bruises on the Chancellor’s body had confirmed it, and multiple witnesses had seen the ARC flee pursuit by General Shaak Ti. Fox was not overly fond of the Jedi as a group, but that changed nothing about the legal analysis. Fives had resisted arrest, fled pursuit, and attacked his men on multiple counts. He had trapped and detained his own 501st company captain and legion general under a ray shield he had no permission to activate in a warehouse he had no permission to be in, (the warehouse’s own abysmal security and safety policies aside,) then had used the captain’s own weapons to threaten Fox and his squad as they ordered him to stand down.

They’d brought in a team of Kaminoan medical scientists via holo for the investigation too. Experts on clone behavior and genomics, they had confirmed the nature of the chip and the strong likelihood that a cerebral parasite picked up on Ringo Vinda was responsible for the malfunction in one clone and madness in the other. Fox had read the report. The scientists had talked about a peptide the parasite excreted that interfaced with certain immune cells and cut off their ability to discriminate between self and non-self, so the immune system within the bodies of the clones had attacked their own brains. No more cases had revealed themselves, so it was possible that Tup and Fives were the only two who had contracted the infection, but if there were signs of it spreading, the affected clones could easily be shipped back to Kamino for examination and treatment.

In the end, everything that the distressed Chancellor Palpatine had told Fox that day he was called back into his office from the hall had borne out. Everything was just as Palpatine said it had been, as he anxiously rubbed his wrinkled forehead and had _finally_ convinced the commander- with a warm smile- to take a citrus biscuit from the little bowl on his desk.

\---

Fox almost hadn’t seen Riyo that night- his administrative tasks had ballooned over the course of a few hours in response to the ARC incident- but he did eventually make it to her apartment. Simply being with Riyo put him in a different place mentally, a place he sometimes struggled to believe he could actually go. She made him realize he had been lonely before, but then he’d taken his bearings and set a course for her shore. Late that night, he just wanted to collapse into her and rest, his body against hers. She was already asleep, but that’s what he wanted too.

He dreamed of a black mouth and a final order. Fox was gone, yet still there. A bright hiss and snap, then plasma-cooked flesh thumping into grit and mud. That smell of scorched plastoid that clung to your blacks like sweat no matter how many times you shoved them in the wash bag or aired them out on strung-up utility cord. Blaster bolts like horizontal curtains of shimmering rain. Cluster munitions popping off like the only fireworks they’d ever known. Helmet filters shucking oxygen from clouds of dioxis over a burbling, choking sound. Something dripped off his greaves- _were_ they his, or just anyone’s? The hiss and snap, but in reverse as the brightness winked out. ‘Riyo’ was a meaningless word, and ‘Fox’ was too. The only word was a single number.

Fox woke up, muscles trembling. He may have been sweating, he didn’t know. His mind reeled. 

The dream again… After so long, he thought he might be done with it. Did that happen though, to any of them? It was like pressing against the open slats in the hull of a shuttle during an overnight troop transport and quietly rubbing one out- everyone did it, everyone knew, and absolutely no one would ever acknowledge or talk about it.

He needed to ground himself. With the rustling of fabric and shifting weight he reached out to touch the woman next to him. 

“Riyo. Riyyyo,” he whispered shakily, trying out her name to try out his tongue and make sure she was indeed there.

What was wrong with his hands? 

“F…Fox… Fox, go to s-sleep…” Riyo mumbled, barely coherent from between the sheets.

That was good. They were both there. He had a tongue and she had a voice, and they both had names.

Fox pulled her into him, holding her tight against his body as she nuzzled against his chest. His hands were still shaking as he fell back asleep.

\---

He went to the gym with Thorn and was briefly disturbed when they synced up in the mirror. Same face, same motions, same PT uniform. Then it happened a few days later with Cutter. Fox immediately ended his sets early, throwing himself into a new exercise to create some mental separation between himself and a clone of himself.

He disassembled and reassembled his DC-17s over his bunk, then he did it a second time. He had to prove that his fingers knew exactly what to do, that he knew everything about his weapons. Fox sat down on the thin mattress when he’d finished, shaking one leg while a blaster polishing cloth was draped over his other thigh. He held a deecee and toggled the firing settings. Then he did it again, compelled without understanding why. Fox shoved the polishing cloth onto the floor in sudden frustration, unable to remember something he had felt was important.

He accompanied one of the Special Tactics Units in assisting the Security Forces with a mass-hostage situation the latter had been unable to diffuse. At one point a shiny addressed him by his CC designator instead of his name, and a hint of the random frustration of earlier flared back up for a second. Probably just needed stims or caf...

Caf- he was supposed to have caf with Riyo later, then they’d go somewhere.

He was looking forward to it. Lately he’d had the uncanny feeling of having been taken apart and put back together again, like his deecee, but spending time with Riyo always made him feel stitched together, more complete. She’d also recently lifted a veil over his eyes, bringing the existence of dozens of different caf blends into his awareness, and she was preparing a different blend each time he got to see her. The caf supplied to the Corrie Guard was purely a tool to him, so drinking the stuff to experience different flavors was a minor novel experience, even if he couldn’t actually _tell_ the difference half the time.

Maybe they could go for a long ride on his speeder after- he had some great ideas about where to take her and where to steer things afterwards. He had another great idea wherein he abused his authority to carry out a surprise contraband inspection on the clone occupants of 79’s with the Thire (who else?), then conducted a special ‘pat-down’ of a lovely Pantoran in the back in private. Then they’d head to the kebab cart down the walkway, and at some point he’d get her thoughts on a convoluted legal case the Guard was dealing with. They both had disagreements and would probably never see eye-to-eye on some things, but he respected her conviction and found value in her lines of argumentation, so he was always interested in hearing her opinions.

Fox rose from his chair later that day after wrapping up a staff meeting for the benefit of Chancellor Palpatine and several of his aids. They had covered updated security protocols in light of the findings from the recently completed ARC incident report, as well as other things less under Commander Fox’s purview but still of interest to him- mostly intel related.

He was glad the meeting was over now; Riyo was still _n_ clicks away but that many minutes closer by speeder. He’d felt tense the whole time, flexing muscles under his armor or squeezing his hand open and shut like he wanted to make sure they all would still work when he wanted them to. Palpatine had also kept looking over at him, for some reason.

The attendees and presenters filtered out of the meeting room. Fox’s eyes hardened when he noticed a uniquely unpleasant set of Gran legislative aids, unengaged in conversation or pleasantries with anybody else, set sights on his helmet and begin an intercept course towards him.

It never ended. There were always politicians under the impression that the Commander of the Coruscant Guard had been shot out of Jango’s gamete tubes for the express purpose of stroking their cocks in reports and meetings while the Good Idea Fairy continued to bless them with revolutionary insights on internal security and military force structure.

Fox made for the exit. He cut external audio on his helmet and laughed in morbid disbelief as the Gan aids pursued. He began recording a stupid holo message to be sent back to headquarters; if he wasn’t going to be able to get out of here and see his Riyo ASAP, nobody would be getting out of here at all. The day was over- he was done.

_Thire this is Fox, fire for effect, over. Target location north of the conference table, two Gan in green robes, danger close, request splash, over._

But then, instead of a non-existent turbolaser blast to vaporize the Gans and his tensed, caf-suffused body, his salvation came in the form of Chancellor Palpatine’s voice requesting Fox to escort him back to his office.

\---

“You seem troubled lately, Commander…” Palpatine furrowed his brows, head twisting slowly away from the window to cast a glance at Fox beside him. His arthritic hands were clasped loosely behind his black robes, and he seemed tired.

“Not at all, Chancellor.”

Fox tensed his jaw.

Palpatine sighed and turned away from the view of Galactic City in the window before him. The horizon was awash in the red and gold of sunset.

“Come, sit with me.” Palpatine started for his desk, a kindly smile on his face. “And do take your helmet off, please.”

‘Please?’ That was a new one. 

\---

Fox sped forwards on his speeder bike, enjoying the swoop of adrenaline in his stomach and feeling more at ease now thanks to the Chancellor’s discussion with him.

At a slow spot in traffic, he unclasped his datapad from its spot on his utility belt to quickly check something and paused, head twitching back a little.

Fox distinctly remembered taking a citrus biscuit from the bowl on Palpatine’s desk and stowing it away for later. He reached into the pouch besides his datapad on his utility belt, but couldn’t find it. He tried another pouch, then all of them.

_Huh. Nothing._

**Author's Note:**

> Actual notes:
> 
> I want to thank and credit Judge1964 in my SWFF Discord server (same name on here) for initially developing the idea of doing the chip order bit from Sidious' perspective. I also credit countessofbiscuit on here for the idea that Palps has sweets on his desk and that Fox likes riding a speeder bike- Biscuit thought of those ideas first and I used them.
> 
> The "stupid holo message" at the end is me bullshitting Fox calling his friend for a faux-artillery strike on the Gan aids based on some info in US Army manuals online. "Danger close" lets the person you're requesting the strike from know that there are friendlies within close range of your target. "Request splash" means you want that person to contact you five seconds before the strike happens and let you know. Honestly I just added this part to show that I headcanon him as having a sense of humor despite being a hardass.
> 
> Commentary:
> 
> The title reflects my characterization of Fox as a man who strongly values quick, decisive action. It is not a commentary on Burke, who was talking about decisiveness as a keystone trait in military leadership and the dangers of hesitation, but a commentary on how Fox sees himself. He is also confident- another valued trait- to the point of being completely unapologetic about his decisions and the reasoning that led him there. 
> 
> While I do think there is evidence suggesting the Coruscant Guard was being manipulated via their chips by Palpatine, I prefer the idea that Fox wasn't directly manipulated at all when it came to pursuing Fives. I tried to put down some of his perspective here in this fic, particularly things that you don't need a chip to explain. (Remember he is privy to a fraction of the information we the audience are in the show.) At the same time I thought the manipulation by Sidious was a pretty interesting concept, so I handled it by having the only manipulation being that he had Fox specifically make sure his blasters were not set to stun. This lets Fox stay in character by remaining dedicated to the only job and mode of life he's ever known by pursuing a failed assassin who resisted arrest. I also didn't want Fox to be somebody so callous as to consciously "fuck-you" murder Fives, who, regardless of the big hierarchical gap separating them as commander and trooper, is still one of his brothers. ("Don't do it trooper!" Hanging back from the circle around FIves can be explained multiple ways, and they're not all necessarily because of a fuck-you attitude towards Fives or a completely blasé attitude towards what he just did.) That and Fox's pretty squarely Lawful alignment mean that he would have preferred to arrest him and let military justice take its course, but at the same time, he does not regret firing on somebody who directly threatened the lives of his own men. So he regrets that he had to, but not his decision in the face of that.
> 
> So that's where Sidious' manipulation comes in. He ensures that Fox does not have his blaster set to stun, knowing that it's in Fox's character not to question his own decisions in the heat of the moment and to be very confident and resolute afterwards. I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that Fox should have changed to a stun setting right during the encounter with Fives, but I do get that he could have changed it while on the LAAT approaching the scene- so I explore chip manipulation here as a way to explain why he didn't. 
> 
> That being said, it could very well be standard practice to lethally shoot people in this situation (honestly who knows,) and Fox wasn't being manipulated at all. He may have thought stun bolts were too slow, not very effective against ARCs, whatever- so it was better somehow to just lethally shoot him. Maybe it didn't even occur to Fox to use stun at all, playing into how I characterize his unapologetic decision making. Though I'm exploring chip manipulation because it's a neat idea, I do prefer zero chip manipulation for this moment.
> 
> In this fic, Fox struggles more with the loss of control over his own body and the feeling that he did something that he didn't want to do in the aftermath of being chip-controlled by Sidious. His struggle isn't that he shot Fives, but that his memories and intentions regarding the firing mode no longer line up with a faint echo of his original memories and intentions pre-chip activation. Because of the chip, he doesn't understand what's going on with him at all, so something just feels vaguely "wrong" until he visits Palpatine's office and nothing feelings wrong anymore, the only non-aligning memories being completely inconsequential ones involving sweets.


End file.
